Jonah Hill is going to be so good in this.

Starring as Dummy Hoy? You guessed it ... Octavio Dotel.

It's not a silent movie? What a missed opportunity!

To make the film authentic, Sandy and Risotto want a deaf person to star as Hoy.

Did anyone else just get a vision of Keanu Reeves jamming a pencil into his ear?

“He’s the man who changed the way baseball really is,”

I don't know what this means. As opposed to how it really isn't? Or not merely how baseball is, but really is?

OK, in the Reds Hall of Fame. That threw me at first.

Surely the greatest player from the Ohio School for the Deaf.

He was still hitting at 40, heck better than his career averages, wonder why he retired.

And he lived to 99.

...To make the film authentic, Sandy and Risotto want a deaf person to star as Hoy.

If Cate Blanchett can play Dylan, surely Marlee Matlin can play Dummy Hoy.

Did anyone else just get a vision of Keanu Reeves jamming a pencil into his ear?

No, but it sounds like a great idea.

And so begins the race to start linking screenplay pitches to The Artist.

Dummy Hoy, the deaf-mute Reds Hall of Fame outfielder who was responsible for umpires using hand signals.

“He’s the man who changed the way baseball really is,” says Sandy, 50, who also is deaf.

this is disputed, as you probably know

It seems like it would be easy to verify if Sandy is deaf.

It seems like it would be easy to verify if Sandy is deaf.

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Why is this news? There are only about eleventy-billion unproduced screenplays in this country that are "ready."

Don't give Repoz any ideas.

With the success of Moneyball, followed by this likely Oscar winner, can a BBTF movie be far behind?

Steve Buscemi as Repoz

Dummy isn't going to be happy with the way he's portrayed, you can count on that. Wonder if he'll sue?

Why is this news? There are only about eleventy-billion unproduced screenplays in this country that are "ready."

Seconded. I would be shocked if there aren't at least five "ready" baseball-related scripts sitting in the basements of various Primates' mothers.

EDIT: A fun and thoroughly pointless activity would be to write a film script for each of the "A Very Good Movie Could be Made About" suggestions in Bill James' two Historical Baseball Abstracts (no idea if he changed his suggestions from one to the other). Someone could make some sort of limited Wiki site and have each one written by a small committee of Primates, sort of open source screenplay writing.

Mike Donlin's life might make for a good movie.

Since there's no reason a black man can't play this role, I insist on Ice Cube playing me.

If not, I insist my character be named Peter Brand.

Hey, baseball movies are becoming hot again. For now, at least.

Alan Arkin as Andy
Ralph Fiennes as Bob Tufts
Joe Pesci as Sam Hutchinson
Rosalind Russell as Lisa

Did anyone else just get a vision of Keanu Reeves jamming a pencil into his ear?

And having it come out clean on the other side?

If this was about the other Dummy, he would surely be played by Leo DiCaprio.

Alan Arkin as Andy
Ralph Fiennes as Bob Tufts
Joe Pesci as Sam Hutchinson
Rosalind Russell as Lisa

A few years ago, BL compared me to Ed Begley from 12 Angry Men. Of course he compared kevin to Henry Fonda, calm reasoning and willingness to compromise being his greatest assets after all.

Elisa Cook Jr as kevin

After 23 years of research, Sandy is certain that Hoy – not umpire Bill Klem – created baseball hand signals.

According to A Game of Inches by Peter Morris, Hoy got ball/strike hand signals from his third-base coach and teammates. Umpires didn't really start with the hand signals until Hoy was retired, and it had much more to do with ballparks getting larger -- and fans in the newfangled upper-decks being unable to hear the ump yell "Ball" and "Strike" -- than with any sensitivity towards the hearing-impaired.

Joe Pesci as Sam Hutchinson

Can Pesci master the accent (assuming Sam does indeed like a guy from Georgia; I'm told I don't sound a thing like a guy from rural Arkansas who's never spent more than a few days north of North Little Rock, so who the hell knows)?

Dummy Hoy? Isn't that like ###### Jim? Or Alibi Ike? Or chinks in the armor?

How about Primates as performers doing certain numbers. Consider the following gobbledygook:

Nieporent as Astaire doing Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Laugh number in Singin' in the Rain.
DiPerna as Bogart doing "no one puts anything over on Fred She Dobbs".
Jolly Old flipping his George Raft coin.
bbc doing Jennifer Jones's Pearl Chavez's lust in the dust twirl and fandango.
Repoz as Orson Welles doing a Paul Masson commercial.

I can do a mean Cardigans' "Lovefool" or EMF's "Unbelievable" if those count.

Failing that I'll go with "Student Revolutionary #3" in BTF's production of Les Miserables.

Repoz as Orson Welles doing a Paul Masson commercial.

Too mainstream. Repoz as Orson Welles doing this.

Yeah, that is good.

I should of said "as the outtakes of a drunken Orson Welles...."

That's pretty mainstream too, isn't it? I've seen it parodied numerous places.

Hey, there are people trying to enjoy their quart of ice cream here. Don't make me spit a shrimp in your face.

"What is it that you want? From the depths of your ignorance, what is it that you want?"

"What is it that you want? From the depths of your ignorance, what is it that you want?"

I have no idea why this is so hilarious, but it is.
I can't wait for an opportunity to use it.

John Candy was on Larry King, and King asked him to do his impression of Welles, and that's what he gave. I thought he made it up, but I guess not.

I would be shocked if there aren't at least five "ready" baseball-related scripts sitting in the basements of various Primates' mothers.

Hell, there's at least that many on my hard drive right now.

How about Primates as performers doing certain numbers.

I'll be Michael Palin as Dennis the Constitutional Peasant.

I'm the guy who protests he's not dead yet.

Alan Arkin as Andy
Ralph Fiennes as Bob Tufts
Joe Pesci as Sam Hutchinson
Rosalind Russell as Lisa

This is brilliant.

Arkin's career got off to about as good a start as anyone gets: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Yossarian in Catch-22. Two nominations in a row for Best Actor. Not too shabby.

Hoy didn't get a thread of his own at the Hall of Merit. The best we can do is a few posts (one of them by me early in the thread) in the 1908 ballot discussion thread, which was mostly about Hugh Jennings. And that was a thread that suffered under a site changeover some years back.

Hoy was a late starter as a ballplayer and a late bloomer - which may have some correlation to his 99-year life span.

Hoy belonged to the general tribe of fast CF with leadoff skills: Max Carey, Dom DiMaggio, Kenny Lofton, and so on. But Ginger Beaumont belonged to that tribe, too, and Hoy lost his major league job to Beaumont in the 1899-1900 contraction. The 12 team NL in the 1890's had a upper division and a lower division, and the teams mired in that lower division had a really bad decade. This is part of the background to the scandal of having interlocking ownership of two or more teams: Baltimore/Brooklyn (resulting in the eventual demise of Baltimore, which had been a great team), St. Louis/Cleveland (resulting in the destruction of a good Cleveland team and the abomination that was the 1899 Spiders), and Louisville/Pittsburgh. The last one didn't really happen until the 1899-1900 offseason in which the NL contracted from 12 to 8 teams. Hoy had been the CF for the Pirates, but the entire Colonels roster was made available to the Pirates. The headline for this was Honus Wagner. Even though Wagner was born and raised in (approximately) Pittsburgh, he was playing for Louisville through 1899. Beaumont moved from the Colonels to the Pirates and took Hoy's CF job. Hoy then landed for the 1900 season with the Chicago team of Ban Johnson's upstart league that was setting a course to challenge the NL. And Hoy stayed with the White Sox in the brand-new major league AL. But for just one year. He was back in Cincinnati in 1902, then played for Los Angeles in the PCL (with Gavy Cravath as a teammate) in 1903.